R P Burnham: 4 books

The Two Paths begins at a lakeside cottage where a group of graduating seniors, all of them members of the football team that had won the state championship that year, are having a celebratory end-of-school party. One of them is Robbie Elder, the hero of that game, and it is he who later in the night...

As he does with his earlier novels, Burnham takes his time in skillfully creating his characters so that by the end, the readers know them inside out, down to their raw hearts. Some characters suffer a transformation; others don’t; but each word and action count and stay true to them, making them...

The book is a mixed bag of satire, mordant and/or playful wit as well as other forms of non-realistic fiction. One has an upper class man obsessed with propriety and decorum who gets his comeuppance; one, exploring a major problem with democracy, is in the form of a gothic chiller; another takes the...

The literary fiction novel opens with a shocking scene: In the small town of Waska, Maine, retired professor Samuel Jellerson, while walking in the woods one day, witnesses an despicable act--a priest sexually abusing a young boy. Jellerson thinks he recognizes the priest, but instead of notifying...